Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting

by J.M. Bernstein

The aim of this book is to provide an account of modernist painting that follows on from the aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno. It offers a materialist account of modernism with detailed discussions of modern aesthetics from Kant to Arthur Danto, Stanley Cavell, and Adorno. It discusses in detail competing accounts of Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, Yve-Alain Bois, and Thierry de Duve; and it discusses several painters and artists in Pieter de Hooch, Jackson Pollock, Robert Ryman, Cindy Sherman, and Chaim Soutine. Its central thesis is that modernist painting exemplifies a form of rationality that is an alternative to the instrumental rationality of enlightened modernity. Modernist paintings exemplify how nature and the sociality of meaning can be reconciled.

Genres: Philosophy

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 12, 2006

About the author

J.M. Bernstein is the University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. He previously taught at the University of Essex and at Vanderbilt University. He works primarily in the areas of ethics, critical theory, aesthetics and the philosophy of art, and German Idealism. His books include: The Philosophy of the Novel (Minneapolis, 1984); The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (Oxford, 1992); Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (New York, 2001); Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (Stanford, 2006). He also edited and wrote the introduction for Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (New York, 2003).